Axios: Millennials Are Much Poorer Than Their Parents

KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty ImagesNEIL MUNRO23 Jul 2018

Thirty-year-old millennials’ fortunes, sex lives, and income are all pitiful compared to what their fathers enjoyed at age 30, according to Axios.

Millennial men pay 2.5 times as much for college, have triple the debt, have half the chance of being married, fewer kids, and are much less likely to own a home, according to the data presented by Axios.

Over the last 4 decades, young Americans have paid more for education even as their incomes have stayed flat. The result? WAY more debt, and fewer "adult" rites of passage like marriage and homeownership.

[Economist Raj] Chetty attributed most of this erosion to slower GDP growth and a change in the distribution of GDP favoring higher earners: GDP would have to rise by 6% a year to get the same impact, he said, and wealth would have to be distributed much more evenly.

Millennial women are individually better off than their mothers — but the women’s husbands are the millennial men.

Missing from Axios, however, is any mention of the causes, such as the federal government’s immigration policy of importing one new worker for every four Americans who graduate school or college each year.

This massive 25 percent inflation of the labor supply is widely ignored by economists who struggle to understand why young men earn so much less than their parents. The new-labor inflation is made worse by the government’s policy of importing temporary workers for good jobs in the expanding professional sectors. Roughly 1.5 million foreign guest-workers now hold jobs in healthcare, technology, academia and other sectors, even as young American college graduates struggle to pay off debts.

President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” campaign would modestly curb the inflow of immigrants and foreign workers, but it is strongly opposed by progressives, Democrats and business-first Republicans.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market — but the government provides green cards to roughly 1 million legal immigrants and temporary work-permits to roughly 3 million foreign workers.